After funeral for a fallen teen, Hillside High takes day to decompress

The Hillside High School community in Durham spent Friday in reflection, a little more than a week after a student from the school was shot nearby.

Police have not made any arrests or identified any suspects in the shooting Feb. 8 that killed 17-year-old Anthony Feaster and injured a 15-year-old student on Riddle Road near Fayetteville Street.

Feaster's funeral was Thursday. On Friday, the school canceled classes in favor of what Laverne Mattocks-Perry, senior executive director for student support services called and "experimental" day to "help people decompress and deal with their feelings."

Mattocks-Perry's staff of counselors, social workers, nurses and others are the caretakers of the campus community, and some of them are also struggling in the aftermath of the shooting.

"Some of those counselors are very close to students, very close to families, and they are just as invested in those students' wellbeing," she said. "Sometimes they are really unable to deal with their own feelings and provide the care. They need care themselves."

Friday featured an in-person session for staff and separate, virtual sessions for students and parents.

Student Jaliyah Alston said she and other members of a program called LIFT, or Live In Future Tense, asked for the mental health day.

"A lot of fights have been happening," Alston said. "People are just very upset and angry and don't know where to take it out."

Wanda Boone started the peer-to-peer program that evolved into LIFT in 2000.

"We hope that we combat hopelessness among youth which may be one of the entrees into why youth participate in risky behaviors and indeed violence," she said.

Alston says LIFT is making an impact at Hillside.

"The way we speak to each other and are able to comprehend the things that are going on in the world, and how we can fix it, as young ladies and gentlemen in the future, is so beautiful to me. It sometimes makes me want to cry, because we are going to do so great in life, and there's nothing that's going to stop us."

But she worries.

"In this generation, life is just like a grain of salt now, and I feel like it needs to be taken more seriously, especially with gun violence.

"If we keep doing gun violence, we're not going to have a generation next," she said.